All posts by Olivier Bootsma

Olivier is an automation consultant at ITQ since 2015. Before he worked for Atos on the automation of the Canopy Cloud solutions. Olivier touched VMware products for the first time in 2011 and has been a fan ever since. Today his expertise is mainly focused on automation with VMware products and designing and implementing the logic that the business requires.

Disclaimer: The API documentation has not yet been released, therefor I would like to notice that this is currently an unsupported method of triggering a directory sync.

During a recent project the customer requested the functionality to create a new business group with just one click. This should be a function to onboard new teams into the vRA environment, including the creation of Reservations and Active Directory groups.

In vRA 6 this would not have been a problem at all, but starting at vRA 7 the Identity Manager was introduced. The Identity Manager, in short the connection from vRA to Active Directory (AD), synchronizes AD content on a specific schedule. This means that while specifying the different AD groups in the new Business Group, these will not be visible immediately but after a synchronization.

As the customer stated, it should be an automated process, a click on the button. Waiting for the synchronization to take place is not an option.. We are automating this, right?! Therefor my colleague Marco van Baggum (#vMBaggumblog) came up with the idea to automate the synchronization of the identity manager. In a shady corner Marco found the necessary API calls and off we go!

The first step is to create the a new HTTP-REST endpoint in vRO. Run the workflow “Add a REST host” located at Library / HTTP-REST / Configuration and use the following settings:

When the workflow package is imported, open the Configuration Elements tab and edit the Endpoints configuration element located under the ITQ folder. Select the correct HTTP-REST endpoint and REST-Operations, insert the correct username, password and tenant to connect to vRA. As a side-note, the used API calls can only be used with a vRA local account. Domain accounts will throw an “Invalid Credentials” error. Make sure that the user has rights to execute a Directory Sync in vRA.

Now go back to the workflow overview and expand ITQ / PSI / VIDM / Helpers. You should have the same overview as in the image below.

Now execute the “Synchronize active directory” workflow and the synchronization will start!

vRO Workflow execution

Please note that these workflows are not production ready yet and bugs may exist!

For the current project I’m involved in, I was asked to deliver a list of vRA deployed machines that have a Production status.

At first I have been writing a short piece of code that obtained all vRA managed machines and for each machine gathered the customer properties. Creating this workflow actually took less time than the execution itself as the environment has about 4200 managed objects. Next to the fact that this is time consuming to wait for, it will also generate a lot of load on the vRO service and the vRA IaaS API.

The developer in me felt like improving this and move the functionality to the vRA IaaS API, the API nevertheless has the custom properties linked to the virtual machine entity object. Eventually, after some research on ODATA queries and how to query for properties within linked entities, I was able to write the following ODATA filter:

The third step is to actually perform the call to vRA IaaS to return an array of vCAC:Entity based on the filter.

The last step in the code is to System.log() the names of the VirtualMachines that match the query.

When necessary to have vCAC:VirtualMachine objects instead of vCAC:entity objects change the last part of the code to:

Map vCAC:Entity to vCAC:VirtualMachine

JavaScript

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varvCACVirtualMachines=machines.map(function(machine){

returnmachine.getInventoryObject();

});

Conclusion

Gathering virtualmachines based on specific properties can be a hassle using ODATA queries as in some cases it is not completely clear on how to structure the query. Eventually when the query is ready and working it shows to be much faster than creating a script to “hammer” the API for data. The two screenshots below show the actually difference between the initial code and the improved code. The first screenshot is the original code, it errors out after 30 minutes of API calls. The second screenshot is a capture of the improved code, it runs for only 1 second to return the list of VirtualMachines matching the filter.

First attempt ended up in an error returned by the vRA IaaS API after 30 minutes of performing API calls.

Second attempt with improved code. The runtime of the script is now only a matter of seconds.

As this is my first blog post at automate-it.today I would like to start off with something less-technical and have a monologue about the Orchestration and your configuration data. This first post will be the first in a series of four; the following post will be more technical and describing the possibilities, technical implementation and their pro’s and con’s.

First off, what is configuration/automation data? In short: the data that supports your automation in terms of decision making and logic.

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Olivier is an automation consultant at ITQ since 2015. Before he worked for Atos on the automation of the Canopy Cloud solutions. Olivier touched VMware products for the first time in 2011 and has been a fan ever since. Today his expertise is mainly focused on automation with VMware products and designing and implementing the logic that the business requires.